Curator’s Choice

• Beyond the Trees
• Innovation Canada
• Collecting and Collections
• The Locomotive Hall
• Canoes
• Canada in Space
• The Shay Locomotive
• Bikes: The Wheel Story
• Connexions
• Tractors
  

This exhibition highlights how, thanks to the contribution of knowledge acquired over the centuries, the forest is transformed as a result of natural and human forces. It presents the science and technology involved in the management and transformation of our forest heritage. In a society where the forest is accessible to many users, forestry is evolving to meet their needs and aspirations, while promoting sustainable development to benefit future generations.

A range of forces, from geographic vastness and extreme weather to our natural curiosity for nature and our world, have shaped Canadian innovations and the country. The exhibition Innovation Canada highlights these factors, and more than one hundred fascinating stories and artifacts they’ve inspired — the tip of the iceberg of Canadian ingenuity. This Curator’s Choice highlights just a few of these, showcasing Canada’s enduring innovative spirit, and our desire as a nation to improve the world in which we live.

Museums are places where people come to see and learn from objects. Carefully collecting and displaying objects are the activities that make museums special. A lot of work goes into building good museum collections and, in this issue of Curator's Choice, we'll give you an inside look at collecting and collections.

The Locomotive Hall is not a traditional exhibit featuring a detailed examination of Canadian railway technology. It is an area where visitors may approach a form of technology normally seen from a distance. Being in and around these artifacts and learning from supporting interpretation, the visitor has a unique and tactile experience that results in a new insight on various aspects of railway technology and its profound impact on Canadian history and life.

There is perhaps no technology more intimately connected to the Canadian identity than the canoe. Canoes: The Shape of Success, the exhibit, explores both the early history of commercial canoe building in Canada and the subsequent evolution of the canoe as a national icon.

An Exhibit on Space Technology

Curators always have a special affection for certain artifacts in their collections. This can be for any number of reasons from importance to the discipline, to ingenuity of design and concept, to association with a particular person or even because it has a special beauty resulting from the materials of construction or the technical skill of the maker. In the Canada in Space exhibit, you will see examples of each of these and more.

The Museum's Shay locomotive is an excellent example of how function, materials and environment combined to influence the final form of a machine.

This travelling exhibit traces the development of cycling technology from its commercial beginnings in the early 1800s to the present. While bicycles are in use around the world, this exhibit focuses on the history of the cycle in Canada and the ways in which Canadians have employed bicycles in their daily lives.

In the time it takes to switch on a light you can send an electrical signal anywhere in the world. All our modern communications technologies—telephone, radio, television, the Internet—harness electrical energy to carry information. Connexions is the story of how these technologies work, how they were conceived by their inventors and shaped by their users and how they have affected the way we live.

The tractors from the Canada Agriculture Museum's collection profiled here and in the exhibit, Tractors, outline the development of this agricultural technology and illustrate the changes and refinements that took place along the way. The move from horse to tractor power on Canadian farms had a gradual but nevertheless profound impact on the farmer and the farm.

A Similar Curator's Choice document from the CAgM may be viewed here: